Ms Jessica Hall:

In response to the point on battery safety, as my colleague discussed, the maintenance regime is really important here. Certain scooters use swappable batteries. This means that if the operations teams on the ground are replacing those batteries every day and putting them on charge every day, the physical handling of the batteries is the check, which is why we have no battery fires in our UK operations. On that, it is also important that the operations teams are not outsourced. It needs to be an in-house operation and they need to be trained by the operators to make sure the level of training is consistent throughout the entire team.

We make helmets available on every scooter. There is a box on our scooters with a foldable helmet inside. We have seen slightly higher helmet usage, with a peak helmet usage of 30% in our DCU trial for scooters at the university. Helmets should not be mandatory but making them available to people using the scooter is a very good approach to take. The same goes for high-visibility jackets, as was said before. The scooters are very visible, usually in bright colours - we can agree on that. The lights are always on and that is the key.